Robotic controls may be used in a wide variety of surgical procedures. For example, in minimally invasive robotic surgery, surgical operations may be performed through a small incision in the patient's body. In addition to a wide variety of surgical procedures, a robotic surgical system may be used with various types of surgical instruments, including but not limited to surgical staplers, ultrasonic instruments, electrosurgical instruments, suturing instruments, and/or various other kinds of instruments.
A robotic surgical system may include an operation assembly and a control assembly, which may be positioned in separate locations. An operation assembly may include various cameras and robotic arms configured to operate on a patient. Cameras may be used to capture desired images of a patient and robotic arms during a procedure. Robotic arms may connect to and manipulate various compatible surgical equipment in order to physically perform a surgical procedure. A control assembly may include a viewing screen and various user input devices. The viewing screen may be used to view images provided by the cameras of the operation assembly. The user input devices may be used in order to manipulate the robotic arms and the compatible surgical equipment attached to the robotic arms. In other words, an operator may remotely perform a surgical procedure with the user input devices of the control assembly and the robotic arms of the operation assembly, while simultaneously viewing the surgical procedure with the cameras of the operation assembly and the viewing screen of the control assembly.
In some robotic surgical systems, the user input devices are physically attached to the rest of the control assembly. Therefore, while the robotic arms may connect to and manipulate various compatible surgical equipment, the same user input devices must be used in order to control various surgical equipment attached to the robotic arms.
Some conventional robotic instruments may be mechanically capable of orienting the end effector of a particular instrument within a three-dimensional space with six degrees of freedom, commonly referred to as up and down, left and right, forward and back, yaw, pitch, and roll. With a robotic tool arm, a user input device may also support movement and corresponding user input with six degrees of freedom. Thus, a user of a robotic tool system input device may move the input device within three-dimensional space, including rotational movements, and those movements may be captured as input and provided to a robotic tool arm to produce corresponding movements of the tool.
However, not all tools or surgical end effectors are capable of movements or manipulation for all six degrees of freedom. For example, one robotic tool may have a cutting or clamping end effector that articulates about one axis on a joint between the end-effector and the distal portion of a shaft that supports the end-effector. In such a situation, user input received from an input device may include inputs for movement for six degrees of freedom, which may force the robotic system to interpret such inputs into five degrees of freedom or less when determining what corresponding movements the tool or end effector should make. If the robotic system misinterprets the intention of the user when converting from six degrees of freedom to five degrees of freedom or less, the robotic tool arm may be moved in a manner that is unintended by the user of the user input device. This could result in the robotic arm either ignoring a movement that a user intended entirely, or performing a movement that the user did not intend, both of which would be undesirable in many robotic tool arm settings.
While a variety of systems have been made and used for managing and converting user inputs for a robotic tool arm, it is believed that no one prior to the inventor(s) has made or used the technology as described herein.